25 • Jeffery Biggers
Jeffery could still hear that baby’s wails. He could feel the little guy writhing against his back, legs kicking, lungs screaming, missing his mother. But the baby and his mother were long gone. And as he stumbled along the Hudson through cleaned bones and past skeletons jumbled and missing pieces, he flashed back to that mother pinned beneath his knee, face down in alley filth, swimming through that accumulation of garbage like she was trying to get somewhere.
“Fuck,” he remembered saying, realizing his situation. He remembered the bark of a cuss, a war-born habit. And even though the shit of the world had been up to his eyeballs in that closed-in alley, some part of him had felt bad for dropping the F-bomb around the kid. As if the tyke were even old enough to learn words. As if a word were any worse a thing to learn than all the craziness beneath Jeffery’s knee and crowding past that wrecked van. Words were hollow compared to this, and yet some of them still felt good to say. Good and wrong, what with that kid strapped to his back.
There were six or seven of the air-chomping assholes in the alley. They squeezed between the wrecked van’s rear bumper and the brick apartment building, drawn in by the baby’s screams, no doubt. There was a loud pop at Jeffery’s feet. He glanced up, thinking something had been dropped from above, then felt a thing brush up against his boot. Flinching, he slapped his hand at the trash to shoo off the rats and felt the mother’s hand grabbing for him, instead.
Glancing down, Jeffery saw her arm snaking back around at him, out of joint, muscles so desperate to get at him that they’d popped her shoulder. He gagged at the sight, this misshapen animal face-down in open bags of rotten garbage, an arm waving at him like some appendage, like a tentacle or tail. What the fuck was he doing down there? And the baby’s screams were deafening—it was fucking up his mojo. What they hell had he been thinking, dropping into that alley? He’d been munching potato chips five minutes ago, safe and sound, and now this.
The half dozen chompers reached the dangling fire escape. Too many to dodge. Jeffery wasn’t sure if he could make the bottom rung in one try, anyway, not with the baby on his back. While the chompers shuffled toward him, he scanned the alley, his heart pounding, for sure they’d gotten him now. Him and the baby. Fucking pointless, coming down there, trying to save anything in that world.
Behind him, the opposite end of the alley ended abruptly in a brick wall. A building had been planted between two other buildings, New York’s empty alleys serving as vacant lots. The chompers were twenty paces away, and Jeffery had to move. He had to release the pissed off mom beneath his knee, needed to make a run for it. He cursed the developers who’d clogged the alleys with their skinny-ass buildings, who’d bricked up so many windows, who’d made running and surviving an absolute bitch.
There was a dumpster across the way. Jeffery made sure the yuppie backpack thing was snug over his shoulders. He grabbed the aluminum pole he’d dropped in the trash, looked for the trashcan lid, decided to leave it, and dashed to the large green container. His knees banged on the metal as he scampered up on the plastic lid. The thing rang hollow, its booming echoes upsetting the child and setting off its wails once more.
The dumpster’s lid sagged under his weight. Jeffery glanced up to see the kid from earlier hanging out his window, watching him. Fucking spectator. Jeffery remembered watching his fair share of disasters the past weeks, wondering when he’d be on the other side. And now here he was. He gazed longingly over the heads of the scrambling groaners as they arrived at the dumpster and clawed and banged against it. The black painted ladder of the fire escape dangled from the sky, an apartment up there that he knew was clean, no chompers hiding in the bathroom, some food and diet cokes in the pantry.
The mother with the fucked-up shoulder righted herself and joined the others around the dumpster. A few were actually trying to climb up, were miming with their legs like walking up steps, the stupid fucks. Jeffery could smell them over his own weeks-old ripeness. A fucking mass grave, that’s what they smelled like. He was standing over the lip of that one in Samawah, the reek of rotting flesh swirling up out of the desert soil. Goddamn, nothing smelled worse than the long dead. The mother waved one arm for her baby, wanting to eat the damn thing and Jeffery both. Its other arm hung like a flapping sleeve by its body, the shoulder not right. More of the chompers were squeezing in between the van and the building. No fuckin’ way out. Goddamn. And that mother really had her eyes set on him.
The lid to the dumpster popped and shifted beneath his feet. Jeffery backed up toward the brick wall behind him. No windows low down on this side of the alley. He pushed against the building to see if he could slide the dumpster on its rusted wheels. No fuckin’ way. Like trying to shove a Hummer uphill. The goddamn undead were rustling the thing, though. The dumpster was shaking and jiving as they bumped mindlessly for the meat up on the lid.
Fucking meat. All those chompers wanted was a bite of his flesh. At least, if he went like this, he’d be a pile of bones. Better that than a nick and getting free. He’d seen both cases. Better to be bones.
The baby stopped screaming. It left the alley full of the grunts and ahhs from the hungry dead. Their teeth clacked on the air, their empty and unblinking eyes fixated on Jeffery. And oh, fuck, he had this idea. Fuck. He glanced up the wall and saw the kid in the window still peepin’ at his misadventures, leaning out over the sill. Black boy. Local, probably. In his teens, younger than Jeffery had figured at first. Goddamn, it’d suck to have anyone watch this. Like a fuckin’ conscience. Like God himself staring down while you did something gravely wrong.
Jeffery thought of all the times he’d been too terrified to masturbate when he was that boy’s age, worried God was watching. Now he worried about this teenager seeing what he was about to do. He loosened the yuppie pack. The chompers wanted meat. Jeffery had meat on him.
The baby resumed its wailing as soon as he got it free. It wailed as he held it out, dangling it like a bag of takeout over the undead, and this awful idea formed solid like a scab in Jeffery’s mind.
Starving eyes lifted to the baby. The dumpster jostled as the damn thing was surrounded, arms waving, more chompers crowding in, nudging the large metal box with their gyrations and hungry growls.
Jeffery felt the eyes from above, staring down. Goddamn, he thought. Don’t watch this shit. He held the aluminum painter’s pole between his knees and loosened the plastic rings that let the sections extend, let the brush reach those high ceilings.
26 • Jeffery Biggers
Days had passed since he’d dropped down into that alley, and Jeffery had run the end of his life over and over in his mind. There was always something he’d change, a knife to take down with him, lowering that damn ladder, being just a bit faster, but never a regret about going in general. Never a pang of regret for that child.
He headed south. There was no traffic—the noise of the city had just stopped, those great and ceaseless rivers of mostly yellow falling perfectly still. The last bit of flow had come days ago with that white pickup that’d barreled through Harlem, an old man behind the wheel trying his damnedest to get the fuck out. He had plowed through row after row of chompers like high corn, tossing bodies aside and running them over.
When his front axle got stuck on a pile of crushed chompers—mounds of them like deep mud—the man had tried rocking it back and forth, the transmission growling as he threw it in and out of gear. Gathering around him, the starving mob had banged on the glass while spinning rubber tore through the bodies stuck beneath the cab. Arms had waved under there like thick grass, the rest of the person crushed. And the smell, an odor horrible enough to drown out all the other horrible smells, rubber and flesh both heating up to burning.
Jeffery hadn’t been one of the lucky ones that got run over, hadn’t been one of those too far away to miss out on the feed. He’d been somewhere in the middle, that worst place possible.
That had been the last time he’d seen a moving vehicle, that white man in that white truck plowing through the hordes of chompers. Now the streets stood still, grotesque and disfigured men and women prowling among the cars like bugs picking through rocks. High above, shapes moved behind shimmering windows, no telling if the people inside were dead or undead, not unless there was a jagged hole and the breeze blew just the right way.
This was what his city had become. Shattered glass, unmoving traffic, hungry packs roaming aimlessly.
